Lit fic as a category is pretty up its own ass, and many reviews for these books are also up their own asses, in a phlegmy, colonic matryoshka of sycophancy and intellectual pre-ejaculate. I don’t really care to participate in this shitfest, so instead, here’s a bulleted list of what worked and didn’t work about A Little Life. There be spoilers. This was fine * Yanagihara: “One of the things I wanted to do with this book was create a protagonist who never gets better.” […]
Nothing will ever live up to Austen’s genius, but this was still a fun read
3.5 stars. I didn’t go into this book expecting Jane Austen levels of genius so my experience reading Eligible was pretty enjoyable. As far as Austen adaptations go, it was pretty great, about on par with something like The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. Let’s be real, it’s unlikely that any adaptation is ever going to reach the heights of an Austen original, but I was surprised by how closely Sittenfeld’s version hewed to Pride and Prejudice. In Eligible, Liz and Jane are both in their late […]
Hot hockey dudes and stuff.
New adult is not my genre. I mostly prefer historicals when I read romance. But occasionally, a book catches my eye and gets such good reviews that the curiosity monster who lives in my head and makes all my decisions just can’t be denied. This was one of those books. I’ve also read m/m romances before, but they are by no means something I’ve read a lot of. This seems to be a very well done one. There’s no doubt it’s new adult, because holy […]
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The Language of Spells is a serviceable lite-fantasy story that I breezed through very quickly, but lacks staying power. The main character, Gwen Harper, is from a family that demonstrates magical abilities — hexes, spells, card reading, and certain individual talents manifest themselves in Gwen, her mother, and her great aunt Iris (notably not her sister, Ruby.) When Gwen learns that recently deceased Iris has left her a house in her name, in a small town that her family had lived in but left when […]